


The Land Of The Midnight Sun

by purecamp



Category: RuPaul's Drag Race RPF
Genre: F/F, Lesbian AU, tw homophobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-16
Updated: 2020-05-16
Packaged: 2021-03-02 17:20:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24220456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/purecamp/pseuds/purecamp
Summary: we're going to be okay - even if we're not just yet. two runaways meet, and share a moment of bittersweet bonding.
Relationships: Sharon Needles/Alaska Thunderfuck 5000
Kudos: 14





	The Land Of The Midnight Sun

Sharon had more regrets than she had adult teeth. The balls of her feet ached, throbbing with blisters from her ceaseless walking. Nettles had been stinging her exposed ankles for the past few miles, and the pain had graduated from irritating to numbing to agonising over time. She smelt bad, looked worse, and was beginning to wonder if she had turned invisible.

Cars passed without so much as a glance towards her outstretched hand. If anything, they probably saw her haggard appearance and sped up, trying to get away from her as quickly as they could. It wasn’t like she could do anything to them, anyway. She walked empty-handed, her stomach growling, a packet of smokes and a lighter in her pocket as her only belongings. No wonder they assumed she was some kind of runaway junkie murderer, hoping to be picked up and driven off into a nightmare.

They weren’t far from the truth, but Sharon had no intentions of killing anyone.

It was a weird time of night, and Sharon didn’t feel sure that she was still alive. As she walked, endlessly walking on a road to nowhere, she studied her hands with a scholarly focus. They were veiny, pale, grimy. Dirt beneath her fingernails. Scratched up. The sky was mauve and the world looked like a bleak 70s horror movie, unusually coloured, unusually silent. Never serene, just unsettling.

Against the unchanging background of the countryside, the gas station lights seemed too jarring, too bright. Sharon headed towards them, light-headed and thoughtless. Gas stations meant food, water and smokes. Given her lack of money, they could also mean police. In that case, gas stations meant a car, somewhere to spend the night, and civilisation again. It was a win-win.

Sharon had been walking for so long. It might have been 7pm or 2am. She had no idea what day it was, or the month. She wasn’t even entirely sure of her own name.

There was an old hunk of junk car hastily parked up beside a pump as Sharon approached. It was dented, a foul peachy-vomit colour, with huge silver scrapes along the rear doors. The thing looked like it had been pulled from the 60s and driven straight into a wall. But it was a car. The driver was busily filling it up.

The less witnesses, the better, Sharon knew. To her surprise, the door above the small shop didn’t have a telltale bell on it, and given that her location was in the middle of nowhere, the cashier likely didn’t expect customers. Good, because they wouldn’t be getting any. Sharon was a thief.

She didn’t need much; a few granola bars and an extra packet of smokes slipped into her pocket and then she was done. Funny how when it came to the middle of nowhere, the laws seemed to slip away and melt. Cigarettes should’ve been behind the counter, not lined up in shiny silver rows for Sharon to take as she pleased. She would call herself lucky if it wasn’t such an exaggeration. Being a runaway was fun.

As she stepped outside, the driver of the shitty old car had stopped pumping gas. She was stood on the other side of her car, kicking the side of it as hard as she could and screaming obscenities.

“A golf club would do more damage. Or a baseball bat.” Sharon told her, slowly coming closer.

The driver stopped kicking and looked up, surprised that she’d been caught. Her eyes were warm green, like grass in midsummer. It was a refreshing change from the maudlin sepia tones of the fields Sharon had been trudging alongside.

“I don’t have either of those.” She responded. Her eyelashes were long, and she smiled prettily as she spoke. Nobody had smiled at Sharon for a long time.

“Me neither.”

Sharon wasn’t sure what it was, but it seemed as though a flicker of trust appeared in the driver’s eyes. She was clean and seemed outwardly normal, but Sharon knew she was damaged too. Not a soul who was so far into the land of the midnight sun wasn’t a dented can, damaged goods, a runaway or a no-hoper or a useless junkie. This woman had seen battles, like Sharon. She appeared to think the same thing.

“I put the wrong gas into this stupid thing.” She kicked the car again for good measure. “I can’t call anyone for help because I stole it from my step-dad, and it’s a missing vehicle. But now it won’t drive.”

Sharon nodded. “No license plate. You’re smart. Not that there’s anyone around here except us.”

“You’re right.” The driver agreed. “Help me siphon this out and I’ll refuel and give you a ride. Deal?”

“Deal.”

Weirder things had happened. Sharon, on her knees, in a gas station, accompanied by a pretty blonde; in times not too far in the past, yet a million miles away, she had earned herself a modest few dollars in such situations. Only this wouldn’t earn Sharon a penny - just oily, grimier hands and a sense of surreal camaraderie with this stranger. The world around them just stood still, as Sharon and a stranger somehow emptied the tank together as though they had been a team for their entire lives.

In a way, they had. Sharon saw the hard glint in the driver’s eyes, the firm line of her jaw, her outward strength and resolution. The small patch on her jacket, clearly ripped and frayed from someone’s fit of anger, showing half of what she was sure had once been two interlocking Venus symbols. Whoever she was, she was running away for the same reasons as Sharon. To free herself. 

They were strangers, and had no reason to trust one another. For all Sharon knew, once they were done, the driver would fuel her shitty car correctly and speed off into the horizon, disappear at the point of no return and fall off the edge of the earth, leaving Sharon in her dust. She would fade away into nothing, in the middle of nowhere, leaving Sharon to question her sanity as well as herself. 

But she didn’t.

With a wry smile, the blonde finished refuelling her car and offered Sharon a filthy rag to help clean her hands. Then, after a moment, she opened the passenger door.

“Get in. I don’t think I’m gonna pay for this one.”

-

The luxury of sitting was a pleasure Sharon had almost forgotten. Her feet still throbbed, her shoes sticky with what she was sure was her own blood, but she could finally rest, nestled in amongst magazines and empty cups and discarded wrappers. Around them, the mauve of the sky had faded into a darker, duller purplish-grey, devoid of stars, as bleak and lifeless as the dead cornfields that rolled past the windows on an endless loop. Their soundtrack was radio static, occasionally interspersed with a soothing guitar twang.

“Who are you?”

Sharon tried to remember who she was. It was a loaded question, really. Who was she? An innocent young girl - no, not for a long time. A dented can, yes. Damaged goods. A jaded, scarred, exhausted girl, separate from the world, freakish and unwanted and strange. She was a lesbian, a punk, someone’s lost sister, someone’s estranged daughter. She was so many things, and she had no idea who she was anymore. She was a zombie, who had walked miles into the land of the midnight sun and now found herself gazing up at the harvest moon.

“My name is Sharon.”

The driver’s voice was unique, and Sharon liked it. “I’m Alaska. Where are you going?”

The land where the sun doesn’t set. The land where phones won’t take calls. The land of the midnight sun. The land of nothing.

“Somewhere that no one can ever reach me again.”

Alaska smiled a second time, pretty still in the diminishing light. “Me too. We can find it together.”

Her face was so beautiful, smooth white skin and long dark eyelashes and an elegant curvature to every single one of her bones. It was marred only by a bruise on her cheek, which Sharon gazed at unabashedly. Even her bruises were perfect, vividly purple, the only bit of colour in Sharon’s world.

“Who did that to you?” She asked, too exhausted to bother with propriety and tact. “Walked into a door? A lamppost?”

She chuckled without mirth, but she seemed unoffended. “Stepdad. Caught me with a girl in my room, starting beating the living shit out of us both. You know what they say.” She paused, her voice taking on a tone of bittersweet sarcasm. “You should’ve seen the other guy.”

Sharon didn’t offer sympathy. She knew her flowery words would bounce off of Alaska’s armour and thickened skin at this point. There was no sense in offering meaningless comfort to this harrowed stranger. Alaska had been hurt. Sharon knew exactly what she meant.

“Yeah.” Sharon pushed her sleeve up, her fingers tracing the cross-shaped red scar that stretched from her wrist to the middle of her forearm. “I understand. Made the mistake of coming out in a religious town that already thought I had a demon inside me. Got sick of the exorcisms and white-hot crucifixes, so I left a note and got out of there. I’m hoping they assume I’ve committed suicide and don’t come looking for my body. I left without a trace.”

“Amen to that, sister.” Alaska bit her lip. The words hung heavy in the dead night air. “Or not.”

Things seemed dark, morose, grim. Yet - and Sharon was sure Alaska could feel it too - there was a pull, a light switch, a sudden shift in the universe, a change in the wind. Everything had been so bad. But things were going to improve. Running away had felt like cowardice, and giving up, and losing the fight. Running away had been an end, and ever since then the world had felt weird, off-kilter, faded. But this was a beginning, and starting with Alaska’s mesmerising green eyes, the colour was going to return.

Life wouldn’t be bleak forever.

“We can stop and camp tonight, if you want.” Alaska suggested. “I have an old tent bundled up in the trunk, and I’m tired of creepy lay-bys at the side of the road. Might be nice to pitch up and light a fire for the night.”

Sharon smiled. It felt so good to smile, after everything. Despite the dark, Alaska carried an infectious lightness within her that seemed to be spreading. “Well, it’s not like we’ll struggle to find somewhere flat enough to sleep. There’s nothing out here.”

“Right.” Alaska giggled. “We got an abundance of nothing out here. How spoiled are we?”

“Practically royal,” Sharon laughed, her voice rasping slightly as she slipped into quiet, jokey song. “I’ve got plenty of nothing, and nothing is plenty for me…”

It was almost completely black when Alaska came to a stop and started to pull out the tent, deciding they had travelled far enough. It could’ve been twenty miles or two hundred miles later, Sharon wasn’t quite sure. All she knew was that Alaska was enchanting and even though every single fibre of her aching body was screaming for sleep, she would happily defy her own needs if it meant she could look at Alaska for a little longer.

With only the help of Alaska’s headlights, they managed to assemble a somewhat pitiful tent. Nonetheless, it was a shelter, and Alaska’s assortment of random jackets, blankets and shirts made a pretty decent mattress in the grand scheme of things. 

“Wait here,” Alaska grinned, her mood heightened by their small success. “You’re gonna love this.”

She stepped away from their camp and reached into her trunk, pulling out two bags and then slamming it shut. As she came closer, Sharon grew confused.

“Wood?”

“For the fire.” She shook her head. “That’s not the exciting part. This is the exciting part.”

She held up the smaller bag, turning slightly so that the headlights of her car could illuminate the packaging inside. Through the thin plastic, Sharon could make out a bottle of red wine and a bag of marshmallows. 

“We get to wine and dine?” Sharon asked, only half kidding. “God… I wish I’d found you sooner.”

She was so beautiful. Her smile alone could battle the warmth of a thousand roadside fires.

“You have a lighter, right?” She asked, then laughed as Sharon rolled her eyes. “Yeah, yeah, I know. Go light the fire, I’m gonna open these up. This is our late-night dinner, like it or not.”

As she flicked her lighter again and again on the wood, soothed by the hypnotic dance of the flames, Sharon sighed dramatically. “Not. Marshmallows are gross, they’re all sugar. It’s like eating a diabetic cloud.”

Alaska laughed appreciatively. “I can’t deny that…” She let the words linger, her accented drawl becoming more and more charming. “But hey. This is just… one of those serendipitous moments in life where two strangers who share a common denominator can sit together and roast marshmallows over an open flame and talk about their lives. I think there’s beauty in that, somewhere.”

It was so difficult not to tell Alaska that she was the reason Sharon could see beauty again. She held her tongue and reached for a marshmallow, skewering it on a stick and settling herself down. The two of them nestled in the entrance of the tent, their knees hugged to their chests, reaching towards the fire to warm them and melt their marshmallows at the same time. With the headlights off, there was nothing but the firelight to wash over them.

“I wanna know happier things. Things we can both relate to. Something that can connect two girls who love girls who are lost in the land of the midnight sun with no intention of ever going back.” Alaska’s voice was dreamy, slow. Sharon was sure she wasn’t real. She was too perfect to be real, more like a hallucination than a person, and yet she was living and breathing and soft to the touch.

They were holding hands, toasting marshmallows with the other. 

“How about… girls?” Sharon suggested, with a quiet laugh. “You have a type?”

Their voices were low, like it was a secret. Alaska spoke louder, breaking the secrecy of it all. They didn’t need to be secretive anymore. They were safe.

“Any girl who looks at me twice, really,” She giggled. “I’m kidding. I don’t think I have a type, I wouldn’t know. Just… pretty girls, I guess.”

Sharon pretended to pout as she brought the roasted marshmallow to her lips, but it was hard. “Oh, shame. I haven’t stopped looking at you, so it only counts as looking once, right?”

“Look away,” Alaska instructed her, the smile evident in the tone of her voice. “Then look back.”

“And then what?” Sharon teased, studying Alaska in the firelight. It softened her features, made her look gentler and sweeter and less damaged. Her sweet soul could shine right through her pain, and Sharon knew it. They were healing. “You’ll kiss me?”

There was no answer.

Sharon could smell burning marshmallows and fresh night air. She could hear the flame crackling, and feel the warmth of the fire. She could see stars, and skin, and constellations of freckles. She could taste Alaska’s lips on hers, breathing new life into her body, awakening sparks from embers she thought had long died out. She was reborn, renewed, rejuvenated. Alaska tasted sugary sweet, like marshmallows, her lips soft and welcoming and full of promise. 

They were okay.


End file.
